Electoral Interference as Reality: A Brief History

Electoral Interference as Reality: A Brief
History

By Binoy Kampmark

We should not
forget the encouragement: hack those emails, extolled Donald
J. Trump during the presidential campaign in 2016. It was
the first public evocation of its sort, an invitation to a
foreign power, in this case Russia, to indulge in cyber
activity that has now been described by various US members
of congress as “an act of war”.

The excitement has
turned, less on the issue of what the material revealed –
suitably damaging, impairing and even disabling of, for
instance, the Clinton campaign – but the fact of hacking
itself. US sovereignty, goes the cry, was breached.

The
sense of many tears over spilt milk is hard to avoid. The
whole dimension of influencing – or at the very least
attempting to – electoral outcomes, has a long history.
In the 1990s, the US election system faced outside
influences – on that occasion from funding sources in
China. Campaign financing, notably favouring the Democrats,
became the hot topic of discussion. As with what took place
in 2016, there was rage and indignation.

Sober voices
suggested that some soul searching beyond the moral cant was
in order. “China has done little more,” claimed Peter Kornbluh of the National Security
Archive, an affiliate of George Washington University,
“than emulate a long pattern of US manipulation, bribery
and covert operations to influence the political trajectory
of countless countries around the world.”

When it comes
to electoral interference, the United States can hold its
own, whether through the soft power hands of the National
Endowment for Democracy, or the more thuggish applications
of the Central Intelligence Agency. In brute fashion, the
US has swaggered imperially into and through state systems
without much care. Even moderate stages of operation saw
funding provided for the Solidarity movement in Poland in
the 1980s, and various parties from Northern Ireland to
Portugal.

During the Cold War, regimes were overthrown
precisely because the electoral outcome was deemed
undesirable to the stake holding power, or even too risky to
entertain. Behind the screens and in the shadows of
elections, local campaigns would also be shaped, funded and
sabotaged. Local proxies were cultivated. The Soviets
empowered their active intelligence arm, the KGB, to engage
in aktivinyye meropriatia (“active
measures”) rich with political warfare tactics to
influence policy.

The US, in mirror fashion, complemented
such tactics, employing strategies of discrediting and
targeting with similar feats of deception. More often than
not, the trajectory disrupting target would be a rabble
rousing populist, storming into the seat of government on
the crest of a democratic wave.

The short of it is that
both the United States and the United Kingdom, both states
distinctly outraged by claims of Russian influence in both
the UK election in 2015 and the US election a year later,
were certainly, and avidly, doing their bit to transform and
retard societies in the Middle East, Latin America and
Africa, restoring ceremonially heavy monarchies, backing
blood curdling despots and encouraging the nasty effects:
murder, looting, carnage.

In the trophy cabinet of such
meddling lie dark memories of the overthrow of Iran’s
Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, a process that
led to the return of authoritarianism in the form of the
Pahlavi dynasty. As the wheel turned in vengeance, the
dynasty would fall to the religious populist outrage
inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini.

To these ghastly exploits
can be added the removal and murder of Congolese leader
Patrice Lumumba in 1961, and the overthrow of Chile’s
Salvador Allende in 1973 in what is remembered as that
country’s September 11. Similar methods; similar bloody
outcomes.

Economic and business imperatives were also
dominant factors. In 1954, the strongarm gangster spirit of
the United Fruit Co. (with direct interests with members of
Congress), did Guatemala’s pro-agrarian and reformist
Jacobo Arbenz in. Behind every nuisance of a democracy
lurked the CIA, ready to pounce and strangle its quarry in
the name of free enterprise.

The best, for last: allies,
friends, who also wish to see their trajectory of history
assured in the other country. After the outbreak of the
Second World War, a threatened Britain was keen to push a
pro-war line in the United States, initiating its own
campaign through covert operations to get the candidates
they wanted into a hostile Congress. Neutrality was the
enemy.

Usdin reminds us in
salient fashion that Britain’s Secret Intelligence
Services were adept at using their own variant of fake news
and smear campaigns against candidates sympathetic to the
“America First” line.

In 1999, a history commissioned
by Canadian Sir William Stephenson, chief
of British Security Coordination responsible or SIS
operations in North and South America (1941-5), was
declassified. It revealed, in stark fashion, the extensive
efforts made by Churchill’s government to intercept enemy
communications, infiltrate labour unions and deploy radio
and print propaganda sympathetic to Britain’s cause
through the United States. Friends, indeed.

In the final
analysis, electoral interference may not even net desirable
results for the purported meddler. Beware the horse you
back, not to mention the faecal blowback. Having Trump in
the White House is certainly a different prospect from
previous presidents, but Russia still faces the sanctions
lobby in the State Department and an increased defence
budget. A cursory appreciation of remarks by the US Ambassador to the United
Nations, Nikki Haley, on the veto by Russia and China of
new sanctions on Syria, would attest to that.

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